"A COMIC'S NAKED DESIRE to make us laugh can be an embarrassment," Pauline Kael wrote in a 1983 review. "Especially if we feel that he's hanging on to that laugh." She was thinking of Steve Martin, of course, holding him up as the picture of effortlessness. And who could argue with her? Martin was all gangle and grace then, in just the right proportions. You couldn't imagine him straining for a role or chasing after an audience. "He's too anomic to be desperate," Kael wrote. How could she know that it would take less than a decade for the desperation to surface; that journalists would be starting their profiles of the man by telling us that "Steve Martin desperately wants you to look at his face on a movie screen...and think serious thoughts"?

Except, perhaps, for Bill Murray, Martin has been the most successful member of the extended SNL family -- he never squandered his talents the way Eddie Murphy did, or let himself go like John Belushi, or turned as cynical and dour as Chevy Chase or Dan Ackroyd. He did, however, begin to play it safe, and when that safety began to bore him, he made no bids to recapture the anarchy and spark of his early performances (the way Murphy has). Instead, he made a play for the coveted "serious artist" slot that's been the bane of so many talented comedians before him. Like a West Coast Woody Allen, Martin tried his hand writing for the stage, the screen, and for The New Yorker's "Shouts and Murmurs" section. The play was passable, the scripts varied, but the New Yorker pieces -- which you got the sense Martin was sinking all his secret ambitions into -- tended to be terrible.

For the first time, we saw Martin sweating for laughs. Allen's work for the magazine crackled with wit and easy invention -- it seemed to erupt in all directions at once (and was, in fact, the overflow from his scriptwriting), with the jokes constantly threatening to overwhelm the conceits. Astonishingly, Martin's jokes turned out to be feeble. His stand-up act had been characterized by avoiding the punch line, so Allen's tendency to pile one laugh on top of another provided Martin with a template that ran counter to his sensibilities. On top of which, Martin's conceits were so obvious and wooden ("Tabloidus: Socrates, I wanted to show you my new Nikon FM2 with 600-millimetre lens. Socrates: Thank you, Tabloidus. It looks fine for taking pictures of ducks flying off in the distance.") that even the better jokes ended up buried under the scaffolding. Many fans did Martin the favor of skipping his pieces. Those who read them sometimes got the same feeling they'd had while watching David Letterman during the late-show host's dark season of the soul. The difference was, Letterman knew when he was fucking up.

Thankfully, Martin's seeming inability to judge his own work has saved him from spiraling into the self-loathing that characterized Allen's later films. Instead, he's settled into a happy mediocrity -- a novella here, another screenplay there, all mildly agreeable, none worth writing home about or even, when you get right down to it, writing. Martin's was such a unique presence on the screen -- think of his easy evocation of Fred Astaire in Pennies from Heaven, or Lily Tomlin in All of Me -- that the derivative qualities of his later work are brought into high relief. He probably deserves better, but so does his audience. Next week, Martin makes his first appearance hosting the Academy Awards. The show is, notoriously, an anarchic mess, but it's exactly the kind of mess Martin -- when he's being himself -- knows what to do with. No one expects to see the old Steve Martin introducing Ang Lee. But is anyone desperate to look at him and think serious thoughts? Perhaps it's time for a third act.